Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life (Hardcover)

~ (Author), (Author)
Key Phrases: skillful decision making, negative ethics, positive ethics, Golden Rule, Transform Work, Choose Action (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Few are likely to quibble that Thou shalt not illegally download copyrighted media files doesn't have quite the solemnity or clarity of Thou shalt not steal. Howard and Korver invite readers into ethics' gray areas and guide them in developing a personal ethical code hardy enough for the most ambiguous situations. The book presents a four-part plan to become aware of ethical temptation and compromise, the fundamentals of ethical logic and using ethics as an avenue to a happier life. The authors successfully tease out the prudential, legal and ethical dimensions of actions—however, readers might become frustrated with the lack of conclusive instructions. Furthermore, while the putative goal of the book is to assist readers in constructing their personal code, the sample models presented are so rife with inconsistencies that the book contributes to more ethical confusion than clarity. While the very nature of ethics acknowledges the varying shades of gray, a bit more black and white when it comes to ethical guidance might lead to a more satisfying read. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description

We often make small ethical compromises for "good" reasons: We lie to a customer because our boss asked us to. We exaggerate our accomplishments on our résumé to get an interview. Temptation blindsides us. And we make snap decisions we regret.

Minor ethical lapses can seem harmless, but they instill in us a hard-to-break habit of distorted thinking. Rationalizations drown out our inner voice, and we make up the rules as we go. We lose control of our decisions, fall victim to the temptations and pressures of our situations, taint our characters, and sour business and personal relationships.

In Ethics for the Real World, Ronald Howard and Clinton Korver explain how to master the art of ethical decision making by:

Identifying potential compromises in your own life
Applying distinctions to clarify your ethical thinking
Committing in advance to ethical principles
Generating creative alternatives to resolve dilemmas

Packed with real-life examples, this book gives you practical advice to respond skillfully to life's inevitable ethical challenges. Not only can you make right decisions, you can acquire new habits that will realize the best in yourself and transform your relationships.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; 1 edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1422121062
• ISBN-13: 978-1422121061
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #397,678 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Solid Ethical Guidance, But Are Ethics The Right Question?, December 26, 2008

By	Philip R. Heath (Hurst, TX United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(What's this?)

Ethics For The Real World was a challenging book for me. Howard and Korver have written a very well organized book that lays out a highly systematic approach to ethical decision making. They do a great job of explaining the problem that they are trying to address: unskilled ethical thinking and decision making. Further, they outline a highly logical bottom up, step by step approach on how one can make improvement in recognizing compromises and sorting out the legal and prudential issues that obscure ethical decision making. Their writing style is not the most engaging, but it is on par with what you would find in most philosophically based books.

So what's the problem? In their guidance of establishing one's own personal code of ethics, the authors encourage the ultimate in relativism. They encourage the reader (as well as their students) to take a cafeteria approach to building their code of ethics by choosing what they will accept and reject whatever they choose from what they have learned from religion, family, society, etc. While the authors draw a distinction between morals and ethics, this seems like cheating to me. Readers who believe that right and wrong are objectively defined apart from any individual will also find this book to be challenging. My suggestion to such readers is to use your moral code as your ethical code and apply the "action based" rather than "consequence based" approach to ethics. You will still have to sift through a lot of relativism so you will have to decide if it is worth it or not. If you tend to take a more post-modern approach, you will find no such dilemma.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seriously good, September 29, 2008

By	Nilofer Merchant "Business Strategist" (Los Gatos, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Hasn't every idea on ethics been covered already?

So what makes this book worth reading?

Because the book teaches you how to think about decisions, and not just to label things 'right' or 'wrong'. I like that. I want to be ethical, just like many people i suppose. And so my intent is aligned there. But i can point to several specific instances of poor ethics where i clearly made the wrong call. This book helps you to make the distinctions in your own life so that when faced with the next fork in the road, you have some tools to figure out what you want, and what kind of person you want to be in this situation.

I found the book really accessible and easy to read.

Kudos for taking a topic well covered for years and making it a teaching tool to relook at our thinking.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Muddled on ethical thinking, but may still be useful for some on practical level, January 29, 2009

By	Sanpete (in Utah) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

(What's this?)

This is essentially a self-help book for clarifying ethical thought and improving ethical behavior. It's different from other such books in applying to ethics what the authors call "decision analysis," an approach to decision making the authors have previously applied in business and other practical fields. The focus is personal everyday ethics concerning things like white lies and cheating rather than "big" but less common issues like abortion and capital punishment. (If you're looking for a book to help with big issues like that, this isn't the book for you.)

The authors are experienced and well credentialed in business and higher education. The material is of the kind you might hear at a business workshop, not academic but pitched for astute readers, with particular attention to how the principles apply in business. At 154 pages plus some appendices, there's enough material for a series of workshops, though many of the basic ideas are repeated several times in somewhat different ways and contexts.

The basic plan of the book is to make us more aware of common ethical challenges and useful distinctions, to teach skills for dealing with them, and to apply the skills. There are step-by-step instructions for constructing a personal ethical code, examples of personal codes written by ordinary people, and suggestions for practical use.

A common problem with self-help books is that they overreach, often by trying to fit every person and problem into a simple solution or system. That's an issue here. The authors make some effort not to impose their view of ethics. They seek to help the reader discover and improve her own ethical views, in accord with her own "inner voice." But the system and advice they prescribe for doing this is still basically the same for all, and it's much better suited to some views than others. I'll explain more below.

Another limitation on the usefulness of the book is that, despite the emphasis on clear thinking, some of the basic ideas and supporting points don't seem clear or well reasoned.

It also seems to me that ease of decision making is sometimes favored over facing difficult ethical problems.

Here are some more details about the issues I mentioned, so you can better draw your own conclusions.

The ethical stance

The authors' preference is for something akin to Kantian morality (so-called after 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant). This includes what they call action-based ethics, according to which an act is right or wrong depending the nature of the act, not its expected consequences. That lends itself to a strict rules-based approach, which they also favor. Among their key tests for rules is a version of Kant's famous Categorical Imperative, simplified by the authors to "Would I want everyone to follow this rule?"

Most of us tend to mix (not always consistently) action-based thinking and consequence-based thinking. Some, such as utilitarians, believe only the consequences matter. The authors clearly disagree with consequence-based ethics, but they try to accommodate it, maybe because so many people's inner voices insist consequences matter. The authors frequently appeal to the consequences to imply the acts in examples are right or wrong (seemingly without noticing that this is a consequence-based approach). However, the difference in how action- and consequence-based ethics determine right and wrong is so fundamental that the authors sometimes can't give the same advice for both. Though book is written mainly with the authors' quasi-Kantian views in mind, occasionally some further or altogether different (and sometimes seemingly grudging) advice is given in regard to consequence-based ethics.

Unfortunately, the authors give a number of mistaken or confused arguments relating to consequence-based ethics, such as that it implies that self-interest can justify ethical compromise (108). They seem unaware of the ways a common type of consequence-based ethics called "rule utilitarianism" addresses many of their concerns. Their main objection to consequence-based ethics appears to be that it's messy and makes it easier to make excuses, but even if that's true (and some would dispute it) that wouldn't imply it's the wrong approach unless we assume the reality of ethics isn't messy. (More on that below.)

Some other ways of looking at ethics also get attention, in some way or other. Religion is treated as an important source for moral beliefs that can be sifted and refined by use of the tools in the book. Relationships are treated as one of the most important points of ethics.

There are other approaches to ethics that the authors don't consider so much. If you think of ethics mainly in terms of virtues, paradigms of good behavior, objective self-realization, or other less common views, you'll find little of that acknowledged.

Easy decisions vs messy reality?

This book seems to place a higher value on drawing clean, bright lines and being practical than on reflecting actual ethical complexity and difficulty. Maybe this is natural for authors who focus on efficient decision making. They object to consequence-based ethics in part because, as they see it, it doesn't lend itself to definite rules and can thus hinder their favored decision process.

They take a similar position in regard to deciding what counts as ethical. There is a distinction commonly made between what the authors call positive and negative ethics, or between "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." Negative requirements like "don't steal" are often easier to pin down and live by than positive ones like "help those in need." Because positive ethical rules can be so difficult to work with, the authors suggest we simply reclassify difficult ones as nonethical "concerns" or "aspirations," to get them out of the way, as it were.

For example, they write, "Instead of thinking we have a positive ethic to feed the hungry, we might think, 'I have a positive concern for feeding the hungry'. We reclassify an ethic as a concern and can then calibrate our charity to match our energy and resources--without jeopardizing our commitment to skillful ethical thinking." (40, cp 56, 79-80) As they see it, there is nothing unethical about failing to achieve concerns or aspirations. (Others, including Kant, have tried to distinguish strict duties from what might be called virtuous behavior, but such a division remains problematic and controversial, and doesn't imply that virtuous behavior isn't part of ethics.)

We get to choose which positive requirements are to be regarded as ethical. "These positive ethics can be thought of as a set of behaviors filling a periodic table of ethical elements. Our job is to decide which elements to call our own." (54)

For the authors this is ultimately a matter for our "inner voice" to determine. That opens yet another issue, which the authors don't discuss, about whether ethics should be treated as ultimately subjective in the sense that what you think is right is right for you. They define "ethics" in terms of what we *believe* is right or wrong (8), and sometimes write as though the point is to avoid future remorse from the inner voice rather than to achieve something more objective (e.g. 73). A subjective approach makes it easier to prune our ethics to a size we're comfortable with.

Now, it might not be a bad thing, practically speaking, to look for ways to make ethics easier. As the authors see it, "Committing to a code we can keep is far better than committing to one that stretches us too far, forcing us to break our own rules." (80) But the most difficult and messy ethical obligations may also be among the most important. The fact that they're hard to spell out or live by doesn't imply they aren't ethical or are less than central to our ethical lives. The book invites us in various ways to put them to the side, in favor of neater duties.

A couple other things

There are numerous other points where I thought the logic was less than clear. Here are a couple examples.

The authors limit (without argument) the ethical to what affects others, but they seem to decide arbitrarily what does affect others and what counts as ethical. They don't count environmental issues or historical preservation (8-9), both of which seem to me to affect others. Whether we should work less so we can be at home with the kids they consider merely a prudential matter (that is, a matter of self-interest) and not a matter of ethics "because we are trading off pluses and minuses, not separating right from wrong." (36) I was unable to see how weighing pluses and minuses implies a focus on self-interest rather than right and wrong. Much of their talk about prudence vs. ethics didn't make sense to me.

The examples used to illustrate points are of variable aptness. They often don't definitely exemplify the point but require the authors to speculate. In some cases the authors seem to abuse examples, as with Kurt Gerstein, an enigmatic figure in the history of resistance to the Nazi Holocaust whom the authors return to several times. They suppose things about his story that are unknown, and treat him as guilty of ethical mistakes without sufficient evidence or argument. I felt their treatment was careless and unfair. Guilt is merely assumed in some other cases too.

Worth trying?

All in all, despite the issues outlined above, this book may still be helpful to some. As a book about clear ethical thinking, I can't give it a passing grade. But even with the risk of some fuzzy thinking and potential wrong turns, it still might improve at least some aspects of your ethical life to try some of the methods the authors suggest. The book will be more appealing and less frustrating if you happen to share the basic moral views of the authors.